Mallaig maintenance time whilst it was wet (and a bit windy)....

Maintenance news only for the seriously sad or those who are terminally bored:

There is a nicely hidden piece of hose that links two metal pipes together which lives behind the exhaust manifold. This is the path for oil to return from the turbo to the engine sump. It gets nicely cooked of course by the hot oil inside and the hot exhaust manifold alongside it.

Well, the hose (all 4 1/4 inches of it) started to look a bit secondhand, the outside of it had "that sheen". So, rather than leave it until it got very unhappy and started to leak grubby engine oil, we foolishly thought it would be worth changing. Having procured a length of suitable 3/4 ID oil pressure hose, the fun started. Here is the nice location:

You can see the short piece of blue hose with it's hose clips, hidden behind the manifold drain. You also get to see the messy exhaust flange onto the turbo (too hot to retain paint happily) and some nicely coiled up spare wiring.

So, you have to remove the air cleaner (not a big issue!) and then wriggle your hands into the tiny gap from the other side to the picture then try and remove the old hose and refit the new one. This is NOT fun. The new hose is way too tight to slide past the belled out end of one pipe, all the way up it and then down again onto the belled end of the other piece of pipe. They sit totally parallel and so you cannot just bend the heavy duty hose around to slip onto the two pipe ends. Warming it up to soften it only lets you get the thing onto one of the two pipe ends before it goes stone cold and refuses to move at all. Playing hot air on it in situ is almost impossible and of course the metal pipes just conduct the heat away very quickly anyway.

You cannot reach the fitting onto the engine block behind the starter motor to allow that piece of pipe to be removed. The other end is a pipe fitted to the turbo which has a similarly hard to reach bolt and would need a new gasket upon refitting it as well. Grrrr.

Retiring hurt was the only honourable option, refitting the old hose that had stretched a little in use and could be refitted by warming it, getting annoyed with it and losing a little skin too. A job for the winter! Will need to monitor it and see if it deteriorates. A new piece of hose is cut to length and has two spare 3/4 inch hose tails firmly inserted inside each end (!) to help it stretch a little just in case it is needed. All in all, a total waste of time so far.

The Steelhead crane had a treat, the turntable and gear drive mechanism that rotates it got greased and then misbehaved. The jib didn't want to retract. Some messing about with the rope that somehow had got tangled up inside and getting annoyed with it fixed that though. Seemed like all the maintenance jobs were becoming hard. An age thing perhaps (boat and captain that is!)

The main engine had a routine valve clearance adjustment. Here is some John Deere / Lugger porn for you, a topless engine:

You can see the nice discoloured exhaust stubs too. No matter what you try, paint just burns off there so we have given up trying to make anything stick. Doesn't look nice but doesn't cause a problem either

Although it is a 6 cylinder engine (with big cylinders!) it is a very low tech one too so nice simple pushrods and only 2 valves per cylinder. Fewer adjustments to check / make. Sometimes simple and low tech is good - always in a boat engine we reckon.

Here is the "Lugger topping" - the valve cover or rocker cover for old timers like the captain:

The ugly rubber thingy attached to it is the hose that fits onto the air cleaner and the turbo. For any other Nordhavn folks who want to remove the valve cover, we reckon that you should do so with this contraption attached. If you try to remove the oil breather pipe from the cover instead, the two little plastic lugs that hold it in are likely to give up, and maybe break off and drop inside the rocker cover itself. Getting them out from the internal baffles would be as bad as trying to change that **** oil hose we mentioned earlier.

Then the big Lugger got treated to fresh oil and a new filter (6 months since the last change). We've mentioned before that the Lugger book says annually or lots and lots of hours (500) for oil changes. We do it every 6 months at least. Oil and filters are way cheaper then engine overhauls. The harbour folks here were as kind as the Stornoway ones - told us to leave the used oil container near the top of the access ramp and they would then put it in their disposal area. Keep reading and learning MDL....